Facebook sues app business over ‘data haul’

FACEBOOK is suing a London entrepreneur who built apps that detected celebrity lookalikes and predicted what people’s babies would grow up to look like, after it is claimed he failed to co-operate with an investigation into improperly harvesting users’ data.

Facebook filed a claim against Fatih Haltas, who owns Mobiburn and Oak Smart Technologies, in the High Court on Thursday for failing to fully comply with an audit request.

Facebook alleges that Mobiburn collected user data from Facebook and other social media companies by paying app developers to install a malicious Software Development Kit in their apps under his company Mobiburn.

Mobiburn promoted itself as a way for app developers to monetise their apps without placing advertising.

It would offer a fee for every time an app developer installed a piece of software on users’ phones that sent data straight to Mobiburn.

Mr Haltas didn’t respond to a request for comment after he was approached by The Daily Telegraph and it is unclear how he used the data he retrieved.

On his Linkedin profile, Mr Haltas claims he volunteered for London and Partners, a department set up by Boris Johnson to attract business to the capital, and responsible for getting names like software company Box to set up its European headquarters in the UK.

The developer technology, when installed on people’s devices through certain apps, collected information from Facebook such as the phone owner’s name, time zone, email address and gender.

The claim is part of a wider Facebook crackdown to protect against abuse after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which millions of Britons’ account information was accessed through a quiz app.

Facebook agreed to pay a £500,000 fine to the Information Commissioner’s Office, the largest possible under old data law, and $5bn (£3.75bn) to the Federal Trade Commission in the US for failing to protect its users’ privacy.

Facebook said it became aware of Mobiburn’s alleged abuse after security researchers reported it through its bounty programme.